I have to take my bow off to you, and apologise a little, you are going about this the correct way.

All of the realms you have listed so far are the lowest popped realms in the EU.

The new numbers won't be fantastic by any stretch of the imagination, but at least by slowly merging these low pops together they get less and less and will obviously be connected again once they are stable.

"In the end, we’re considering a number of factors, including Battlegroup, population, and faction balance."

Faction balance is definitely being considered, but it is a tricky factor though, because generally the factions are not balanced within the same realm types.

If we were connecting PvE realms with PvP realms, then faction balance would be much less of an issue since our PvP realms are typically Horde heavy, and our PvE realms are typically Alliance heavy. But since we have to connect realms within the same realm types, the population will be increased on the connected realms but we cannot fully balance the factions on all of those realms.

That being said, the overall population situation on those realms should feel vastly improved overall once we are done with the whole process, so although the outnumbered factions in some cases will remain outnumbered, they should still see a nice boost to their numbers.

Will you keep adding more realms if connected realms are still too low?

Sure. As an example; Emeriss and Hakkar have been connected now, and Crushridge will be connected with those two realms next, and more realms will be connected to those three in the future.

Remember, what you are seeing now is just the beginning. Plenty more connections will be made, which means that it is way to soon to proclaim doom and gloom on the few connections that have been made so far ;-)

I'm sorry, once more, but You are connecting 2 COMPLETELY empty servers to emeriss. why would you connect 3 realms together while 1 has an "ok" amount of 90's, emeriss in this case, and 2 thats made of thin air? isn't it better to connect hakkar with emeriss and crushridge with another realm like emeriss? I don't see it fullfilling the purpose of populating the realms further, nor help the technical issues by mixing in massive amounts of realms without it changing anything.

hakkar and crushridge basically contributes nothing to emeriss, but ofc, the other way around, emeriss contributes to them, But why would you attach 2 empty realms to the same one? wouldn't it be serving a much better purpose connecting those nothingness realms to one other realm?

Edited spelling mistakes

Because those three realms will be connected, the population will effectively be larger on all the three realms. Right now it might not feel like much of a population boost for the players on Emeriss, but it will already feel like a significant population boost for the players on Crushridge and Hakkar. We have just begun the realm connection process though, and more realms(yet to be announced) will be connected to Hakkar, Crushridge, and Emeriss.

In short, once the entire realm connection process is complete for Emeriss and all the realms(some that are still to be announced) that Emeriss will be connected to, players on all of those realms will feel like they are playing on one single well populated realm.

As I mentioned before, this is only just the beginning of the realm connection process, so it is a little too soon to declare doom and gloom ;-)

after seeing that Scarshield Legions and Spooregar will be merged, arent it better to just merge the RPPVP servers with each other?

The plan is that Scarshield Legion and Sporeggar will be connected with more realms in the future, but we cannot connect all realms in one go. We have to do it in a staggered manner to make sure that realms will be connected 100% correctly without any complications.

One of the reasons why we are not announcing all the planned realm connections right away is because we want to be careful with raising false expectations in case something does not go according to the plan. If we announce specific realm connections in advance, then we will naturally raise a lot of hope and expectations for the players on those realms scheduled to be connected, but if some unforeseen complications would then arise that would result in us not being able to connect some realms as planned, then we will have a lot of upset and disappointed people.

Hey Vaneras i´m curious to know whats th target population for each final group of connected realms. Something like a high populated server? or Medium?

Thanks a lot.

I can't give you any specific numbers,

But the target is high population realms with some additional capacity for new players and/or migrating players. We basically want a healthy population for the connected realms, but not so high that there will be queues from the get go.

Regarding Connected Realms, the only noticeable difference you should expect to see is the realm-name being attached to the nickname of anyone who doesn’t belong to your own realm. The whole experience should feel seamless. Not being connected to any other realm should not affect you in any negative way, on the contrary, we expect everything to simply be… better.

Update 05/11 – As a part of our ongoing Connected Realms implementation, we will be connecting additional realms as listed below. We don’t have a specific date yet on when these connections will occur, but we’ll provide another update once we do.

Next Realm Connections:

Burning Steppes and Kor’gall

Mug’thol and Dethecus/Theradras

Temple Noir and Naxxramas

Crushridge and Emeriss/Hakkar

Sporeggar and Scarshield Legion

Vek’Lor and Arthas

Shen’dralar and Zul’jin

Haomarush and Dragonmaw

Chromaggus and Shattered Halls

Shattrath and Garrosh

Dalvengyr and Nazjatar

Bladefist and Zenedar

Runetotem and Killrogg

We’ll provide updates on the next batch of realm connections as they're available. For more information on Connected Realms, please read the preview blog post here.

The Breaking News say:Agamaggan, Emeriss, Hakkar and Theradras.Lets hope this is a visual mistake and you wanted to say Crushridge instead of Theradras. If not, you may encounter problems with the language being Theradras german and the other 3 servers are english.

Not a single alliance raiding guild on the Agamaggan/Emeriss/Hakkar/Crushridge connection. -.-

Feel free to start one ^^

Can we fix turalyon horde before WoD please?Kinda hard to recruit for mythic on a dead server side.

Realm Connections will improve the size of the player pool you can recruit from, so the situation should improve for players in a minority faction once their realm has been connected. When possible, we've tried to help even out the factions when choosing which realms to connect, but there are heaps of other factors to consider. Plus, on EU PvE realms Alliance outnumber the Horde in general, so achieving perfect balance is not possible.

@Allianceduck: I have to point out that is already weekend and rather late, too. Most blues are probably catching (hopefully a good night's) sleep. Anachronos is not on the lists yet, but the same applies to many other small realms, too. Blues can not give definitive answers to questions to which they do not (yet) have one. I am not a blue, but I can say this much. I think Anachronos will get connected, but as to when and with which realm(s) remains to be seen later. If you read back on the thread, you will notice that some answers are very short and not everyone gets a personal reply. Even so, things can and do happen.

Allianceduck, as Trelw explained above, if your realm has a low population it will be connected with another realm. As I've said before, no low population realms are being left out of this. Please be patient, we're getting there ^^

Takralus how do you define a low population, Hellscream is listed as a mid popped realm, but so was it durning vanilla, tbc, wotlk, while back then we had a lot more active players then we do know.

Yes, 'medium' does cover a lot of ground. Obviously some medium population realms lean more towards 'low' whereas others are just under the 'high' threshold. It's all assessed when we're looking into the possibility of connecting them :)

Hey all, I just updated the info in the first post. Sorry for the delay!

A couple of things changed: Arathi and Temple Noir/Naxxramas have been re-scheduled, and so was Thunderhorn and Wildhammer. As you can see, Thunderhorn and Wildhammer should be happening soon, we'll keep you posted on the next batch as soon as we know :)